@Anonymous wrote:I cancelled my membership. Am I safe or should I renew. Btw I accidentally deleted the membership emails.
deleted emails can be restored.. should be safe 
Well, I am letting mine ride, figure what will $5 a month hurt.
I am putting 50 to 100 a month in my savings.
I only have 100 in there at the moment.
I would really hate to have my unicorn canceled over a $5 a month membership, but that could be just me.
@CreditCuriosity wrote:So serious question here... Be honest. Whom here still has membership to IMBA or did you already close it is first question... Second question do most people just have the bare min $25 parked into savings? I renewed my IMBA and probably will few a few months just to be safe so they can't find a loop hole to boot me out. Also have a bit over a 1k parked in checking atm and just $25 in savings. Need to call them about auto loans as good rates(assuming they will finance outside of alabama(tbd by a phone call), but looking at a new BMW and they are offering .9 apr atm, so will most likely go with captive lender when i choose to buy if it is anytime soon.
Thats a good point.
@Anonymous wrote:
@JamP wrote:Well, I am letting mine ride, figure what will $5 a month hurt.
I am putting 50 to 100 a month in my savings.
I only have 100 in there at the moment.
I would really hate to have my unicorn canceled over a $5 a month membership, but that could be just me.
Just remember that $5 a month undoes the first $500 of spend each month over a 2% card!
@CreditCuriosity wrote:So serious question here... Be honest. Whom here still has membership to IMBA or did you already close it is first question... Second question do most people just have the bare min $25 parked into savings? I renewed my IMBA and probably will few a few months just to be safe so they can't find a loop hole to boot me out. Also have a bit over a 1k parked in checking atm and just $25 in savings. Need to call them about auto loans as good rates(assuming they will finance outside of alabama(tbd by a phone call), but looking at a new BMW and they are offering .9 apr atm, so will most likely go with captive lender when i choose to buy if it is anytime soon.
I said I was going to put more than $25 in, but actually they only asked for $25. When I get the card though it's going to get swipes, I might even move some direct deposit over there just to make it easy. I did the runner's one though membership till end of the year.
Let me know if they do refinance the auto loan, I'm on the fence of refinancing my own as I technically don't owe US Bank a payment until 12/2021 and I think I'm going to kick even more money to it before the end of the month since I'm in striking distance of testing an installment loan breakpoint and I'm thinking of accelerating the payoff anyway... or at least down to a yuppie foodstamp and let it ride till 2023 or whatever.
@CreditCuriosity wrote:
@kdm31091 wrote:
@Anonymous wrote:
@JamP wrote:Well, I am letting mine ride, figure what will $5 a month hurt.
I am putting 50 to 100 a month in my savings.
I only have 100 in there at the moment.
I would really hate to have my unicorn canceled over a $5 a month membership, but that could be just me.
Just remember that $5 a month undoes the first $500 of spend each month over a 2% card!
This exactly. Since for most the $5 a month membership is effectively useless (i.e. you probably would not be joining otherwise), it can be looked at as basically an AF and should be included in your value assesement of the card. Obviously 3% is great but like LTL said that $5 a month eats up the first $500 in spend a month. Many people have non-category spending greater than $500 a month, but even at $1,000 you are really only gaining $5 over a 2% card because you started off -$5. The point is to keep it all in perspective.
What other 2-3% or whatever card has a 7.49 fixed apr? Yep you got it... Trust me I get it, but least i can throw them $5 for a few months for an awesome CU so far and a great card with a very low APR.. Does one need to keep the membership, nah.. Is it the right thing to do for a few months as it got alot of us membership to an awesome CU/Card/APR, etc.. IMO for me, yes.. Others can differ on their feelings.
That one tidbit might get me to ask for a CLI someday. I could've asked for more but 10K was enough for my conceviable use case but 7.49% would be my second lowest APR that I could draw from to float balances if I get into a truly awkward situation, and I probably lose my HELOC access for a while if I sell the LA condo and the HELOC isn't enough justification to keep the old place.
Actually that's an interesting thought that just struck me, if / when I sell the LA condo instead of just redeploying that to other investments I might use a chunk of it to pay the new mortgage down to 70% or whatever which would allow me open up the godlike HELOC again. That also dumps the PMI and escrow if I refinance, escrow bothers me given I could be earning a few hundred bucks annually on the arbitrage for property tax and insurance payments and that alone probably justifies it.